Ryan Englin on Building PA Podcast: Hire Better People Faster in Construction

I went on the Building PA Podcast with Chris Martin and John O'Brien to talk about why construction companies keep struggling to find good people and what they can do about it right now.

Chris and John are two marketing guys who serve the construction industry in Pennsylvania, so this conversation hit different. They already understood the marketing side. What they hadn't connected was that the exact same principles they use to attract customers apply to attracting employees.

We started with the real problem. Owners in the trades know how to build things. They don't know how to build teams. They strip the human element out of the equation. They call their crew "the hands." When those hands don't work out, they just go get another set of hands. That's not how you build a company people want to stay at. People get up every day and go to work because they love what they do and they love who they do it with. Remove half of that equation and it's just a job. They will bounce.

I talked about knockout questions and why the typical screening questions on Indeed are a waste of everyone's time. Most companies ask "do you have experience" and "do you know this tool." That tells you nothing about who someone is or how they think. We build screening questions that reveal values and priorities. For a superintendent role, we pulled four things from the job ad that matter to the company and asked candidates to rank the most important one. Every answer is correct. But now I know if safety is your number one priority or if staying on budget is. That changes the entire conversation. I want to understand how people think. I can teach skills. I can't teach someone to think differently.

We got into recruiting as marketing, which is the foundation of everything I teach. Before I started Core Matters, I owned a marketing agency. My contractor clients kept telling me they didn't need more leads because they didn't have enough people to do the work. So I applied marketing principles to their hiring. It worked. Fast. That pivot changed my entire career.

The math matters here. Active job seekers make up only 3 to 5% of the market. Those are the people on Indeed right now. Passive job seekers make up 70%. They will make a change when the right opportunity falls in their lap, but they aren't out there searching. That means your social media presence, your employer brand, your reputation in the community. All of that is doing the heavy lifting for the majority of the people you want to attract.

I shared one of my favorite tactics for building your talent bench. Take everyone who applied in the last two years but didn't have enough experience at the time. If they stayed in the industry, they probably have the experience now. Put them on your bench. Send them a simple text or email after your next company party. Three words and a photo: "Wish you were here." That's it. No pitch. No pressure. Just connection. One of my clients built a huge bench this way. When a position opens, they don't scramble on job boards. They call someone from the bench.

Chris made a great point during the conversation. He said this is exactly what every marketing strategist does with prospects. Where's your list? Where's your email list? Where's the lake you've been filling with potential customers? We do this for marketing without thinking twice. But when it comes to recruiting, we completely disregard it. And I know why. HR people are not marketers. Recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. Take recruiting away from HR. Give it to your marketing team. That one change will transform your results.

I closed with something that fires me up every time. When an RFP comes in from a dream client, owners will leave a party on a Saturday to call them back. But when an applicant comes in on a Friday afternoon, they say "I'll get to it next week." By Thursday they finally call. No answer. No reply. And then they say "see, nobody wants to work anymore." That person wanted to work a week ago. You ghosted them first. Most Americans can't miss a single pay period without going broke. They found another job while you were sitting on their application. Respond fast or lose them.

The biggest challenge my clients face is change itself. They've done it one way for 10 or 20 years. They know it isn't working. But doing something different takes effort and it takes commitment. The companies that commit to the process. The ones that slow down and build real systems. They stop posting jobs, stop scrambling, and start having people come to them.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these concepts on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe and check it out.